With the go ahead she needed, Katie began by getting her pupils to record their speaking assessments on Voki.com and filming each other saying phrases in Spanish. She is quoted as saying:

“Specifically for a foreign language, it’s a great way to both formally and informally access speaking abilities, which is really hard to do on a regular basis because of class sizes and lack of time.”

Buoyed by this success, Katie then chose to use the tool Poll Everywhere to help them practise their writing skills through text messaging and displaying the results on the interactive whiteboard. As she points out in our interview, this means that pupils can answer anonymously and therefore not feel singled out or embarrassed if they make a mistake. Katie intends to create multiple choice with Poll Everywhere too replicating a kind of classroom response system where she can immediately assess her students’ understanding and see what they need to work on.

"Being able to text in class is just something new and in a way rejuvenates us because it is not the usual 'take notes, then do homework,' like we do in the rest of our classes," 16-year-old Pulaski student Kevin Dunford said. "It's a new flavor."

Not content with simply exploring the potential of mobile phones in lesson time, Katie has been creating distance learning resources for her students to access in their own time outside of the school day. For example, Señora Titler has uploaded her own grammar PowerPoints to VoiceThread and added a voiceover recorded from her mobile.

Please note that the phone numbers Katie uses for Voki and VoiceThread are US numbers and so for those who don't live in the States, I would suggest you record with a microphone instead or upload mp3 files you've already created. However, don't despair as Poll Everywhere and Gabcast do have a range of international numbers you can ring, if you fancy trying out some of the ideas presented here! Gabcast has also recently received new sponsorship and is again free to use which is great news for fans of the phonecasting tool.